It is often observed that the familiar story of the origins of Rome appears to combine two distinct and incompatible legends: that of Aeneas, and that of Romulus and Remus. The first of these was in origin a development of a Greek story, with its roots in the epic tradition. Aeneas, the son of Venus and Anchises, escaped from Troy with his family and friends and after a series of adventures arrived in Italy where he founded Rome. The other story, that of Romulus and Remus, was localised in Latium. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the god Mars and Rea Silvia, daughter of a king of Alba Longa. On the orders of their grandfather they were cast into the Tiber. The river happened to be in flood, and when the waters receded the boat containing the infants was left high and dry at the foot of the Palatine, under a fig tree later known as the ficus Ruminalis. There they were suckled by a she-wolf, whose den was the near-by cave of the Lupercal. Rescued by shepherds, the boys grew up and after the death of Remus in suspicious circumstances Romulus founded a city on the Palatine, where his original dwelling, the casa Romuli, was preserved in later times.

It is always a useful opening to say what one is not going to talk about, so I shall start by saying that I am not going to talk about the influence of Seneca on Elizabethan tragedy. That is a topic which during the last couple of generations has probably suffered from over-exposure, and the pendulum has now swung from excessive claims for Senecan influence (ghosts, blood-and-thunder, the whole apparatus of the ‘Revenge’ play, and so forth) to the other extreme of allowing perhaps too little of Seneca in sixteenth-century tragedy – not even as much as the rhetorical features for which it seems to me he is clearly responsible. So perhaps we can give this topic a rest – a lot of books and articles have been written about it anyway. What I want to do is to explore some sixteenth-century critical attitudes to Seneca – mainly his tragedies, but his prose works will come into it as well. We shall see, I think, some interesting preoccupations which a wide-ranging and intelligent number of scholars had in what they said about Seneca – in particular, his style – and this will lead to a consideration of Polonius' well-known remark to the players in Hamlet (II. 2. 392 ff.): ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light’, and the question what precisely he meant by ‘heavy’. In doing this we shall not simply be burrowing into a rather dusty and recherché corner of literary criticism, but I think we shall be able to throw some light on wider aspects of Renaissance poetic and dramatic theory, which I am certainly not competent to discuss in detail; but I may stimulate somebody else to go further than I have done.

My aim in this paper is to examine the general conception and the detailed problems in Aristotle's comments in the S.E. on how to organise the handling of false refutations. The influence of Aristotle's work in this area has been immense, as C. L. Hamblin has recently shown: the discussions of fallacious and illicit reasoning in books of logic down the centuries are dominated by the aim of adhering to what their authors conceive to be Aristotle's divisions of the subject. Even after the logical and metaphysical bases on which the Aristotelian treatment rests had been abandoned, logicians persisted with a codification of fallacies the very purpose of which had become obscure. Hamblin has well exposed the distortions to which the servile but misconceived tradition has subjected Aristotle's insights. Now that modern developments in formal logic enable us to appreciate that Aristotle's syllogistic occupies a small, albeit paradigmatic, part of the calculus of relations, we are better placed to understand the character of the non-syllogistic areas of his logical work. At the same time there has been a growth in the historical understanding of Aristotle's dialectic. So the way should lie open to a better appreciation of Aristotle's conception of errors in argument, and to a clearer grasp of the actual phenomenon.

A possible place to start yet one more discussion of the song of Silenus is to reiterate Otto Skutsch's ‘robuste Fragestellung’ of 1956: ‘Was will im Grunde die sechste Ekloge besagen?’ One could argue that the answer is ‘Gar nichts’: this is perhaps the implication of some treatments, notably of Zeph Stewart's article and of at least the first part of Williams's discussion of the poem in Tradition and originality in Roman poetry. Anyway it is a tenable hypothesis that we should regard the values of the sixth Eclogue as purely formal and that it is a positive error to look behind its exquisite formal ποικιλία for some discursive statement about life or poetry or both. ‘Look behind’ is certainly what in this case we have to do if we want a discursive statement, because overtly the poem makes no such statement. But from antiquity to now it has been hard to rest with the hypothesis that the poem's values are purely formal, and this recurrent unease seems motivated by something about the poem, not just something about its readers: reluctant or not, at intervals most of us do grit our teeth and say: ‘Etwas besagt sie schon.’ The variety of views about what that something might be and the sad banality that the something too often turns out to exhibit have not so far deterred us from trying to find it.

We owe to Mr N. G. Wilson – C.R. XXI (1971), 172 – the demonstration of an analogy between the maxim Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμἠρου σαφηνίӡειν and Agathon's remark, as reported in Aelian's Varia Historia 14. 13, λέληθας σεαυτὸν τὸν Ἀγάθωνα ἐκ τοῦ Ἀγάθωνος ἀφανίӡων. Mr Wilson goes on to argue that the maxim post-dates the remark. I shall here argue the converse.

Consider the two following forms of words:

A. Ἀγάθωνα ἐξ Ἀγάθωνος ἀφανίӡειν.

B. Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου σαφηνίӡειν.

We are agreed that they are related, for their structure is almost identical, viz. proper name in accusative, same preposition with proper name in genitive, two verbs differing only by two letters (in speech the difference would be even less – … ς ἀφανίӡειν and σαφηνίӡειν). This particular relationship is such as to exclude the possibility of a common source, for there is no other quadrisyllabic verb plausibly available to rhyme with either of these, and no other name that could plausibly replace either the greatest Greek poet or the greatest Greek tragedian after the classic Three. One of these two forms is primary, the other secondary. But which is which ?

At the opening of Plato's Ion Socrates expresses his admiration for the rhapsodic profession in a characteristically ironic way:

I have many times envied you rhapsodes your art. Not only are you always dressed up in a way that accords with the dignity of your profession, and you cut the most imposing figures but you are also required to spend your time on many good poets, and above all on Homer, the best and most divine poet of all; and you must have a detailed knowledge not only of his verses but also of his meaning (διάνοια). All this makes you an object of envy.

Ion agrees, saying this is the aspect of his art which has demanded the greatest effort of him, and he declares:

I think that I am the best exponent of Homer, and neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos nor Glaucon, nor anyone else in the past has ever been able to express so many fine thoughts about Homer as I can.

A. Ag. 1125–8

1127 in mutatum, sscr. M: rell.: utrumque Σ M.

Page in his note holds that refers to the weapon, and that … must therefore be taken closely with ; and he produces a number of examples from early poetry to refute Fraenkel's view that the resulting interlaced order is impossible. I shall argue (i) that his examples of hyperbaton do not support his conclusion; (ii) that, apart from word-order, his view is untenable.

‘Le fondateur du Lycée était à Athènes un métèque; cette position marginale est pour quelque chose dans son détachement et sa lucidité.’ Thus a recent and stimulating commentary upon the economic and social structure of Greek society, in a formulation of the obvious difference between Plato's participation in and Aristotle's observation of contemporary political phenomena. In one area, however, it was Aristotle rather than Plato whose experience was the more direct – that of life, over a prolonged period, as a resident alien. In this brief παίγνιον I shall pursue the Aristotelian side of this contrast along three paths: (a) Aristotle's exact juristic status in Athens; (b) the feelings aroused by his presence there; and (c) what he himself has to say on the subject of metics and foreigners. I advise the reader to derive what satisfaction he may from the journeys themselves, for no startling revelations await him ἐν τριπλαἴς ἁμαξιτοῖς.